Marijuana Blog

Snoop Lion's 4/20 Festival was put out before he even had the chance to light up.

According to TMZ, the rapper held a marijuana party at a Hollywood Hills mansion and it was shut down by police just as he was arriving to it.

The party reportedly started yesterday at 11 a.m., but neighbors in the surrounding area complained to the police about "the noise levels and parking situation." TMZ reports that the party didn't have a permit either.

Cops arrived and shut the party down, but Snoop was reportedly very cooperative during the ordeal -- talking to the police and understanding why it was being shut down. The site says that nobody was cited at the party.

Before the celebration, Snoop seemed ready to party in a tweet he wrote. "Bout to be #Snoop420," he tweeted. "Who's celebratin' wit me. The happy holidays."

When we marijuana aficionados celebrate 4/20, it’s not because we’re looking for a excuse to party and get high. We’re getting high already; we don’t need a calendar and a watch for that. No, what we are celebrating is our culture and identification as members of an oppressed minority. 4/20 isn’t just our “Stoner Holiday”, it’s also like our “Pride Parade”. It’s our stand against those who seek to keep us second-class citizens. It’s our rejection of being forced to hide in a smoky garage while our friends drink beer openly in almost every public accommodation. It’s our fellowship in shared traditions borne of outlaw status, like taking a furtive toke in a bathroom, blowing smoke through the ventilation fan, using eyedrops and Febreze and a lighted match to disguise the evidence of our “criminal” acts. It’s a collective rememberance of our friends and family who lost anything from a job or scholarship to their freedom or their life because nature’s most human-beneficial plant is banned.

As I was finishing up my preparations for my 4/20 presentations tomorrow, I received the embedded picture above from a friend. It is from the Facebook account of Christine Tatum. She is a journalist and anti-pot crusader who I’ve mocked in the past for her over-the-top reefer madness. But this post, on 4/20, blaming marijuana for two young men’s destructive lunacy, moves her from the “mocking” column to “righteous indignation” column on my “To Do” list.

Let’s see, there are 26.1 million annual tokers, 17 million monthly tokers, and 2 million daily tokers in America. Two of them are alleged terrorists. That’s literally, at best, a one-in-a-million risk.

On April 20, people around the nation will celebrate the enigmatic 4/20 holiday by smoking, toking and eating marijuana. According to federal law, they could all be arrested for using a Schedule I substance, a classification that also includes drugs such as LSD, PCP and heroin.

President Barack Obama supports that law, or at least has done nothing to change it -- and he could, simply by rescheduling marijuana out of Schedule I. Despite his past as a renowned ringleader of the pot-smoking "Choom Gang" while growing up in Hawaii, his administration's current position offers little sympathy for marijuana, regardless of the drug's legal status in various states.

According to the White House's official position against legalization, "marijuana use is harmful and should be discouraged." Obama has dismissed legalization as well, and while he's said that the recent pot legalization efforts in Washington and Colorado prove there needs to be a discussion, there have been no signs that he plans to scale back his aggressive enforcement policy.